Feeding & Nutrition

The heat that July was the kind that comes through the walls and sits on you. The dog, a spaniel built for fields not flats, was spread on the tiles with his tongue out and his eyes saying we have made a terrible error in geography. I'd done the fan, the shade, the bowl of cold water he ignored, and none of it reached the part of him that was clearly melting.

I was shelling peas for dinner, the frozen kind from the bag, and dropped a few on the floor by accident. He lurched up, ate them, and for the first time that day looked like a dog and not a rug. So I tipped the whole tray out in a line across the cool kitchen and watched him work down it, crunching, chasing the ones that slid, suddenly a creature with a purpose instead of a puddle.

It did something I didn't expect. The cold in his mouth, the small hunt, the distraction from the heat, it lifted him out of the stupor. He wasn't cool, exactly, but he was himself, and a spaniel who is himself is a spaniel who can be cooled, because he'll move to the fan, he'll drink, he'll stop being a lump. The peas were a switch, not a cure.

We did it all summer after that. A tray on the really bad afternoons, a handful on the mild ones, and it became a game he'd remind me of by sitting by the freezer at three. Frozen peas, or sweetcorn, or the tiny carrots, anything frozen and safe and cheap, scattered on the tile so he had to work for it and the working kept him off the hot floor by the window he loved and shouldn't have lain on.

I checked what was safe first, because frozen doesn't change the rules. Peas yes, plain, no salt, no butter, the same as the tinned ones people worry about. Sweetcorn in small bits, fine for most. The point was cold and crunch and a job, not nutrition, and I kept his real food normal so the peas were a treat, not a meal wearing a costume.

The cheapness is the part I tell people. A bag of frozen veg is pennies, lasts forever, and beats the fancy cooling mat he chewed through in a week. The mat promised relief and delivered stuffing on the floor. The peas promised nothing and delivered a dog who'd forgotten he was dying of the heat. Sometimes the answer is in the freezer next to the ice cubes, not the pet shop.

He's older now and the summers still flatten him, but the tray comes out the moment the fan stops being enough, and he still does the happy lurch, the old spaniel who learned that the worst afternoon could end with a chase across the kitchen for something cold. If your dog melts in the heat, try scattering something frozen where he can hunt it. It won't fix the weather. It might fix the afternoon.

The neighbour's kid saw him chasing peas and asked if it was a game, and I said it was a summer game, and he started bringing his own dog over for pea hour, and the kitchen became a small happy chaos of spaniels hunting frozen veg, which is a sentence I never thought I'd live to type about my own flat.

I froze a tray of just sweetcorn once and he turned his nose up, which told me it was the pea specifically, the small round thing that rolled, and the rolling was half the game, so I went back to peas and let the sweetcorn be mine. The treat has to move to be a hunt, and a hunt is what cools a hot dog's brain when the air won't.

One proper hot day I tried it and the peas melted faster than he could eat them, so I learned the trick needs the cold to last, and I pre-froze a tray and tipped it straight from freezer to floor, no thaw, no compromise, and he got the full chase before the last one went soft. Timing is the whole of the cheap trick.

He's older now and the summers still flatten him, but the tray comes out the moment the fan stops being enough, and he still does the happy lurch, the old spaniel who learned that the worst afternoon could end with a chase across the kitchen for something cold. A cheap bag of frozen veg out-thought a thirty-pound cooling mat, and the dog knew it before I did.

The vet asked at the summer check how I kept him cool, and I told her about the peas, and she laughed and said keep doing it, the cold and the movement beat any gadget, and I felt smug, the ordinary owner with the better trick than the catalogue. The dog, under the exam table, was already eyeing the freezer in the staff room.